Colonies/capitulation questions

Okay:

-How many cities should you have before the you stop/free them.
-How do you free them. I turned the idiot advice off, so where do you go to free them manually?

-If you want capitulation, do you raze cities, or capture them. Is the AI more likely to cap if you raze stuff?
-How many do you need to capture/raze on average before the AI will give in.
-If the AI is at war with someone else, how do you keep him from capping to them (so irritating!)

Colonial maintenance really kicks in at city #3 although it is manageable at that point.
On whether or not to free them, both have advantages...
You can trade with your colony but you can't use hammers/food from your colony.

Courthouses/Forbidden Palace usually help with colonial maintenance.

To create a colony, press F1 and click the Fist icon in the bottom right.

-If you can hold the cities, keep them, the population points and buildings make you stronger

-it's more complicated than that: you need 2x power, 2x land, 40 war success (+/-10 per city, +/-4 when attacking, +/-3 when defending). For example, I kill 4 units attacking and lose 1 while capturing a city: 4(4)-1(3)+1(10) = 23 war success
There are a lot of other factors for capitulation

-bribe peace, give units to the weakling, give land to the weakling

I have never seen the point in letting cities go, colony costs are controllable even for large numbers of cities on another land mass, large cities (greater than size 10) always pay their keep and more, and the extra hammers are nice, just make sure you have courthouses, forbidden palace if possible in the colony cities, do not create a colony vassal. The effort to build or caspture those cities is not recouped if you pass them off to a vassal.
Capitulation is useful though in war, it ends war quicker reducing resources required, gives an happy face in all cities per vassal and gives you an ally forever, with this ally's contributing being taken into account when assesssing the capitulation requirement in future wars against other AI's.

insaneweasel said:

Okay:

-How many cities should you have before the you stop/free them.
-How do you free them. I turned the idiot advice off, so where do you go to free them manually?

-If you want capitulation, do you raze cities, or capture them. Is the AI more likely to cap if you raze stuff?
-How many do you need to capture/raze on average before the AI will give in.
-If the AI is at war with someone else, how do you keep him from capping to them (so irritating!)

Click to expand...

I agree with Trev, if you have a lot of cities that could be colonies, consider State Property. I only free cities to my vassals.

In order to free them, go into the diplo screen with a nearby screen. If the city is in white, you can give them the city. As above, I seldom do this.

How many cities to capture/raze depends on many factors. Relative strength, war losses and who the AI is. Some AI's cap easily, others you almost have to completely kill to get them to see the light.

You can't completely stop the AI from capping to someone else. It might even happen when you're at war with them! If the option to cap is white for you on the diplomacy screen, it might be available for others too. Since I like vassals, I usually accept capitulation ASAP because they might cap to someone else.

Trev said:

I have never seen the point in letting cities go, colony costs are controllable even for large numbers of cities on another land mass

Click to expand...

Define "large" for the number of cities? After 4 cities, the cost begins to skyrocket. If you have 8+ cities, the colonial costs are going to be at least 50 per city, and courthouses don't affect that at all. To make up for that, they have to be working at least 10 fully upgraded cottages, and I don't think that's feasible unless you have a ton of time.

insaneweasel said:

Define "large" for the number of cities? After 4 cities, the cost begins to skyrocket. If you have 8+ cities, the colonial costs are going to be at least 50 per city, and courthouses don't affect that at all. To make up for that, they have to be working at least 10 fully upgraded cottages, and I don't think that's feasible unless you have a ton of time.

Click to expand...

State property

insaneweasel said:

Define "large" for the number of cities? After 4 cities, the cost begins to skyrocket. If you have 8+ cities, the colonial costs are going to be at least 50 per city, and courthouses don't affect that at all. To make up for that, they have to be working at least 10 fully upgraded cottages, and I don't think that's feasible unless you have a ton of time.

Click to expand...

This is highly unlikely. Colonial costs are limited in each city to a maximum of 2 times the current distance cost. So even if you have 8 cities on the same landmass, if the maximum distance costs is 9 then the colonial cost can only be 18. And both costs are affected by the courthouse (and Ikhanda), but also subject to inflation. A well known way of limiting colonial costs is to build the Forbidden Palace on the landmass, this reduces the distances costs significantly and hence the colonial ones.